Want to be a better writer?

March 26 - Carol Crawford - instructor

He Said, She Said:  Tackling Dialogue in Prose

This interactive workshop will help you bring your characters to life with dialogue that is authentic, clear, and compelling.  Capture the flavor of personality, place, and culture through speech that sounds real.  In-class exercises will cover word choice, tone, action beats, what to leave out, and format.
Fee: $40

April 23 - Catherine Carter

Description:

Bracket and Hinge: Strengthening Poems’ Sonic Level. In this 2-hour lecture/workshop, Catherine Carter will use contemporary poems to discuss a few of the ways in which a poem can be built around the sounds of single words, model one possible process for revising a poem in this way, and encourage participants to do this with their own works. Participants should bring hard copy of one or two of their own short poems to work on.
Fee: $40

June 25 - Patricia Zick

Patricia Zick's workshop, "The Road to Publishing" will explore the different choices for publishing a book. Then she will delve into the step-by-step process for self-publishing a work of nonfiction or fiction using Amazon’s publishing platform. Ms. Zick, the author of twenty-five published books in a variety of genres, will demonstrate how to prepare a manuscript, provide definitions for publishing jargon, and walk through the process for uploading a book for both Kindle and paperback publication to the online retail site. 

Fee: $40

Registration must be made ten days before class date.
Contact glendabeall@msn.com
Send check, $40.00, made to NCWN West 
Mail to: PO Box 843, Hayesville, NC 28904

GEORGIA AUTHOR OF THE YEAR

The deadline for nominations for the 2020 Georgia Author of the Year Awards has been extended to February 15. Please see the details below for the submission guidelines. The 56th Annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards Guidelines Please carefully review these guidelines before submitting a nomination. Nomination Fee: $60 per nomination Deadline: February 15, 2020 Eligibility: -Chapbooks and books published within the 2019 calendar year (January 1 to December 31). Reprints and second editions are not eligible. -Books that underwent a selection process with the publisher, in which the author was subject to acceptance or rejection. -Books that were were professionally edited during the publication process and the book did not require the author to pay for the publication. Electronically published books on a major platform (Kindle, Nook, or iPad) are also eligible. For electronic books, a URL and ISBN must be provided as well as one print copy of the text for judges to review. Books will not be considered nominated if any of these guidelines are not met and materials and payment are not postmarked by February 15, 2020. First- and second-place winners will be announced at the Georgia Author of the Year (GAYA) ceremony on June 13, 2020. Required Materials The nomination form, fee, and two hard copies of the nominated book must be received on or before Saturday, February 15, 2020 (postmarked). Please complete and submit the nomination form and pay the $60 fee here. Two hard copies of the nominated book must be mailed to: Georgia Writers Association Georgia Author of the Year Awards 440 Bartow Avenue #2701 Kennesaw, GA 30144 Definition of a Georgia Author for the 56th GAYA To be considered a Georgia author and thus eligible for nomination for GAYA, an author must meet one of the following criteria: the author must have been a resident of Georgia when the nominated book was written, though she or he may have since moved out of state; or the author must be currently living in Georgia when the book is nominated. Definitions of GAYA Categories and other information for the 56th GAYA can be found here.  Frequently Asked Questions can be found here. Nominations can be submitted here.

CRITIQUE YOUR MANUSCRIPT, YOUR POEMS, YOUR SHORT PROSE

BLUE RIDGE WRITERS' CONFERENCE - APRIL 3 AND 4

Just a reminder for those of you who might want to have work critiqued at the Blue Ridge Writers' Conference in Blue Ridge, Georgia, April 3 and 4, 2020.  The deadline to submit work for critique is February 28.  Here's the link:

https://www.blueridgewritersconference.com/critique-options.html 

We have a great slate of speakers this year and we hope you will join us!

https://www.blueridgewritersconference.com/about-our-speakers.html  

Carol

--

Website:  carolcrawfordediting.com

Email:  carol@carolcrawfordediting.com

Phone:  706-633-6497

Welcome to young writers who follow and use this site.

Often our members fail to subscribe to or  read our blog page. Keeping this site relevant takes much of my time and that of others. I know when you don't read or subscribe because you ask me questions that are easily found on this page. As a serious writer, it would benefit you to subscribe and keep abreast of what is offered here.

I am sharing an email I received this week, and I hope those of you who don't support your own website and blog will realize why we continue to take time and energy to write here, many times at the expense of our own work.

Good Afternoon Ms. Beall,

I volunteer with a creative writing club for children and we wanted to let you know how helpful the NCWN West "writing resources" page, https://netwestwriters.blogspot.com/p/writing-resources.html , has been for us!

We meet on Wednesdays & work on writing prompts, and the kids bring in poems or short stories that we all go over... It's a lot of fun! Lately we have been working on longer narratives, and we've been getting a ton of use out of resources we found on your page.. especially the Writers Digest site.

I have a girl in the group (Carley, one of the youngest we have, actually) who suggested we say thank you! She's already quite a talented writer, and she wanted me to share a resource that she found about becoming an author. She brought it to our meeting for everyone to check out, and she thought you'd be interested in it too... https://www.zenbusiness.com/info/writing-careers/

I was wondering if you might be able to add it to your resources? Carley was really excited to see what you thought so I'm guessing she'll be thrilled to see her suggestion up on your page. Hopefully it helps other aspiring writers who are using your page, like us!

Thank you again, Glenda and if you decide to add Carley's link I can show her at the next meeting :-) Have a good day and enjoy the rest of your week .

Happy Writing,

~Michele Wilson (and the BPL Young Writers Club)

We have listed Carley's link in our Resources for Writers list. Thank you so much, Carley, for sending this link and for using our blog and website to help you become an even better writer. 

Congratulations to Michele Wilson and the BPL Young Writers Club, and we would like to invite you to send us some of your writing to post on this page. We need young people who like to write and who will become the thinking and inspiring writers of tomorrow. 

Writing Classes in Clay and Cherokee County NC - Register now

Tri-County Community College
Register with Lisa Long, Director of Community Outreach, by calling 828-835-4241 or email her: LLong@tricountycc.edu

Creative Writing with Glenda Beall

Students in a TCCC class

A class at John C. Campbell Folk School before writing classes were held
at Orchard House

John C. Campbell Folk School Classes at Orchard House in Brasstown, NC

www.folkschool.org 

Mining the Mother Lode - Making the Most of Your Material

Date: Sunday, Mar 1 - Friday, Mar 6, 2020 Subject: Writing Instructor: Darnell Arnoult Share: One of the great lessons we learn as writers is that we almost always write about the same things over and over. Characters, places, and plots may appear different, but we are driven by the same passions, questions, and obsessions - the same vein of ore. Use exercises and assignments to dig deep into personal experiences, curiosities, and knowledge to strengthen your writing. This class is beneficial to beginning and experienced writers of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.  To register for this class, please call 1-800-365-5724.

Vicki Lane 

A Practical Guide to Writing Popular Fiction

Sunday, June 7 - Saturday, Jun 13, 2020

Moss Memorial Library - Hayesville, NC  

March - August, 2020 - once each month on
4th Thursday afternoons - 1:30 - 4:30
Contact: Glenda Beall - glendabeall@msn.com

March 26 - Carol Crawford - instructor

He Said, She Said:  Tackling Dialogue in Prose

This interactive workshop will help you bring your characters to life with dialogue that is authentic, clear, and compelling.  Capture the flavor of personality, place, and culture through speech that sounds real.  In-class exercises will cover word choice, tone, action beats, what to leave out, and format.

April 23 - Catherine Carter

Description:

Bracket and Hinge: Strengthening Poems’ Sonic Level. In this 2-hour lecture/workshop, Catherine Carter will use contemporary poems to discuss a few of the ways in which a poem can be built around the sounds of single words, model one possible process for revising a poem in this way, and encourage participants to do this with their own works. Participants should bring hard copy of one or two of their own short poems to work on.

June 25 - Patricia Zick

Patricia Zick's workshop, "The Road to Publishing" will explore the different choices for publishing a book. Then she will delve into the step-by-step process for self-publishing a work of nonfiction or fiction using Amazon’s publishing platform. Ms. Zick, the author of twenty-five published books in a variety of genres, will demonstrate how to prepare a manuscript, provide definitions for publishing jargon, and walk through the process for uploading a book for both Kindle and paperback publication to the online retail site. 

Ready to get to work on your writing?

Ready to get serious about your writing? NCWN-West holds writing events in most counties southwest of Asheville. As far north as Henderson County and as far south as Cherokee County, find an opportunity near you  to meet other writers. When you attend and meet others who write poetry, fiction, or nonfiction, you will be welcomed. The meetings are open to the public. We hope you will join us as you learn what NCWN-West offers our members. We hold  events for writers in Blairsville and in Young Harris, Georgia.

 Writers' conference at Hinton Center in Clay County NC

Visit the Events, Groups and Workshops page on this website for contact information. 

Call for submissions Creative Nonfiction Competition

Great monetary rewards in this contest:

The North Carolina Literary Review will be accepting submissions for the 2020 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize competition. We have $1000 in prize funding for the winner and finalists selected for publication in NCLR by final judge Philip Gerard, author of Cape Fear Rising and winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award for U.S. Southeast - Best Regional Fiction.  



Submit essays, memoir, travel writing, and other creative nonfiction up to 7500 words between January 15 and March 1. For eligibility guidelines and submission instructions, go to: http://www.nclr.ecu.edu/submissions/albright-guidelines.html. 
We require no submission fee, but you must subscribe or join the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association to submit. 

See back issues for previous years’ winners and finalists. For subscription information, go to www.nclr.ecu.edu.  



North Carolina Literary Review
Mailstop 555 English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858-4353

www.nclr.ecu.edu
phone: 252-328-1537

Editor: Margaret D. Bauer (BauerM@ecu.edu)



Please like us on Facebook for up-to-date NCLR news posts:

https://www.facebook.com/northcarolinaliteraryreview

Jackson County Open Mic Night, 6:00 p.m. Friday, January 17th

Jackson County's monthly Open Mic night at City Lights Bookstore on Spring Street in Sylva has a new time--6:00 p.m. instead of 7:00 p.m.  The next Open Mic is Friday, January 17th.  Come on out and read with and/or listen to a small but friendly and supportive group of writers, and have a glass of wine and a cookie!

Hat's off to NCWN-West member David Andrew Westwood--new book, The Paisley Tree House

Check out NCWN-West member's new book, The Paisley Tree House



Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll ... and a distant place called Vietnam. 1968 is shaping upto be a tumultuous year in America, though in Topanga Canyon, northwest of Los Angeles, little of the tumult is visible. Freaks coexist with straights and bikers, the sound of dulcimers and the smell of weed is in the air, and young men quietly disappear to serve in a war in Indochina. One Topanga family embodies the conflict sweeping the nation-—the Sobieskis. But unlike most, it’s parents Maddy and Bret who are laid-back hippies, and elder son Jackson who perversely yearns to prove himself in battle. Middle children Sundown and Robbie are, like their parents, well entrenched in the counterculture, while young Charity just tries to make sense of everything. Soon, the family’s ties are tested by the worst upheaval they can imagine. And at the center of it all is the paisley tree house.


David Andrew Westwood was in an L.A.-based band in the early seventies, and as a transplant from London the whole experience seared itself into his memory, turning itself into textural detail for The Paisley Tree House. Nevertheless, this is not an autobiography. Westwood is the author of thirteen other novels.

You can find Westwoods work at Amazon.com, and at:

 https://www.davidwestwood.com/writings

Stop the Trees from Growing

You can read a poem of mine, Stop the Trees from Growing, on Your Daily Poem,

http://yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=3204
If you like it, I hope you will leave a comment.

Thanks, Jayne Jaudon Ferrer, for continuing to publish poems every day.

Come see Bob Grove perform A Christmas Carol, tonight, at the John C. Campbell Folk School at 7:00 PM, Keith House Community Room, Brasstown, NC

December 11, 2019

Time: Admission:

7 p.m. - 8 p.m. Free

Location:  Community Room, Keith House

A Christmas Carol

In period costume, Bob Grove will present a dramatic reading of the classic tale, including character voices. In the familiar story, miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future who, in the course of a night, convince him to abandon his "bah, humbug" ways.

https://www.folkschool.org/event.php?event_type_id=15

Please leave your comment. They are important to you.

In May 2008, when this blog was very new, I posted the following directions on how to leave comments.

I have updated the text and updated my email address. I am no longer writerlady. I am now gcbmountaingirl@gmail.com.

I will go over the comment process and hope it will be helpful. At the bottom of a post is a line of type with the name of the person who posted the story. This may not be the writer. It might be me, Glenda Beall.

Next to my name and the date you will see a line that looks like this:

0 comments or (number) comments.

Click on comments. A window opens. 

Write your comment in the window or box.

You may sign your name in the same window with your comment, if you want. We are allowing anonymous comments, but each one is read before it will be published.

You can also leave it as anonymous and the comment will be posted with no name.

Blogger was bought out by Google, so if you have a "google account" or if you want one, complete the information asked for. (gmail is a Google account) If you have a gmail account (email) it is very easy to comment on this blog.

To make it simple, post as anonymous. Click on preview and see your comment as it will appear. Click on Publish when you are sure it is just the way you want it. 

X out of the comment window and forget it for awhile.

The comment must first be approved before it will show up online.

I will read and publish it for the blog site. We do this to protect our blog from spam that can pop up from some nasty people out there.

Your comment will not show as soon as you post it. Please be patient. Come back some hours or even a day later and check to see if your comment has been published. You might have a response to your comment. Search Engines, I'm told, learn much from your comments which can be helpful in building your platform as a writer.

We appreciate your efforts to let our writers know what you think. You can also email gcbmountaingirl@gmail.com if you have any questions or comments about this site.

BOOKMOBILES STILL SERVE RURAL COMMUNITIES

Earlier this year I wrote an article for the NCWN Newsletter that featured libraries. I was asked to write about bookmobiles. I wondered if we still have bookmobiles. I well remember the bookmobile that came to our farm in the summer. I loaded up on books to read until the bookmobile came again.

Bookmobiles Then and Now

As a little girl, I loved books. In the summer, on the farm, I had no books to read until the big yellow bookmobile pulled into our yard. It was my lifeline to the outside world. Mother called out, bookmobile is here. My little sister and I scrambled out the door and ran to the vehicle that looked like a van. Inside was a small library, its shelves lined with books for all ages. 

I remember the smell as I climbed the three steps up into the truck, a mix of polished wood and books. The front and back doors were opened wide to let in light. My eyes went straight to the books about horses.

We loaded our arms with as many as we could carry. Mother said, “Now, remember there are other children who want to read some of these books. You can’t take all of them.”

I never thought about where the bookmobile came from or where it went when it left our house. I devoured the books, and I could hardly wait for its return.

The bookmobile served rural areas as early as 1904. The People’s Free Library of Chester County, South Carolina provided a mule-drawn wagon that carried wooden boxes filled with books. In those days, bookmobiles were known as book wagons.

A pioneering public librarian drove a Ford Model T packed with books to rural areas in New Jersey as early as 1920. 

In 1923, it was the Hennepin County Public Library of Minneapolis that followed with bookmobile services. In the 1930s and the 1940s, in Kentucky and in Appalachia books were taken to those who were unable to make it to a library. However, the real boom for bookmobiles was throughout the 1950s when I was a child.

In 1950, North Carolina had the highest number of bookmobiles—87. Thanks to the Library Services Act of 1965, the bookmobile services rapidly spread and reportedly reached more than 30 million people across diverse rural communities. In 1970 bookmobiles in this country numbered two thousand, but in 2012 there were only eight hundred bookmobiles left in this country. Part of the decline was due to high cost of fuel. 

The Nantahala Regional Library Bookmobile serves Clay county.

Early bookmobile in Kentucky

Trudy Morrow and Debbie Whitener, librarians on wheels

Recently I talked with Trudy Morrow and Debbie Whitener, who drive a bookmobile in three counties taking books to those who have no other way to get them. Debbie said she has been doing this for seventeen years.

I told them how much the bookmobile meant to me when I was a kid. They were happy to take me inside and show me the newer version. Their route includes Clay, Cherokee and Graham Counties in rural western North Carolina. This bookmobile is based out of the Nantahala Regional Library, located at 11 Blumenthal St. Murphy, NC. Another bookmobile serves Jackson, Swain, and Macon counties as well as the Qualla Boundary.

The bookmobile has a monthly schedule. The drivers go where they are asked to visit—public, private and home schools, day care centers, nursing homes, and personal homes where people are not able to visit a public library. It takes four weeks to complete the route. The bookmobile maintains contact with the home office at the Regional Library Headquarters via cell phone while out in the service area.

Friday is the bookmobile’s day off, but the drivers/librarians are at the library and on call for anyone wishing to be put on the schedule.

As I stepped up into the mobile library, Trudy showed me the children’s books to the left. Picture books lined the bottom shelf. In the next section were books for older children, both fiction and nonfiction. On the opposite side, on light colored shelves, were the western novels like my father read, Louis Lamour, Zane Gray, Luke Short and books my mother would have checked out. Magazines are available, also. The overhead lights brightened the interior making it easy to read the titles on the covers unlike the dark walls and shelves of my youth. It seemed much smaller than the bookmobile that came to my house. But I was much smaller then.

Here in western North Carolina there is still a need for the mobile library.  I know the joy felt when the bookmobile arrives at someone’s home, whether that person is an adult who can’t go to the downtown library, or a child who has no access to a library. Books can carry that disabled person out into a world he will never see, and it offers dreams for children who might someday have the opportunity to make them come true.

See more photos of early bookmobiles at https://www.boredpanda.com/bookmobile-library-on-wheels/?utm_source=search.myway&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic

 

Poets and possible classes for 2020

Congratulations to Carroll S. Taylor for having her poem chosen to appear in Reach of Song for 2019.
Read more including the poem and words of the judge here.

Mary Ricketson recently had another poem published in The Lake, a fine journal.
Read her poem here.

Our Netwest poets continue to submit and publish their poetry all over the world, not just in the USA.

If only Nancy Simpson, poet and instructor, were here to see what she created in Clay, Cherokee, and the counties in north Georgia with her classes at John Campbell Folk School and Tri-County-Community College. 

Nancy Simpson

Carroll Taylor never met Nancy, but has benefited from all of us who learned from Nancy, as has so many others.

Every week I receive calls from people who want to learn, to take classes and become poets and writers of prose and who want to become part of our fabulous writers' group.

Aren't we fortunate to live here and be part of the writing community?

If you live in Murphy, Hayesville, Hiawassee, Young Harris, Blairsville or within driving distance of Tri-County College, you can check with Lisa Long about upcoming writing classes for 2020. Contact me, Glenda Beall, at gcbmountaingirl@gmail.com and I will try to help you with information.

What makes NCWN-West compelling to newcomers

Tonight I read a post that I would like to share with all of you.
Carroll S. Taylor has a beautiful website and her blog is called Journal. 
This post, on November 4, comes from her heart, I know, and she sounds much like I did when I moved here to this part of the world and my life forever changed. 
Read this and see what you think.
http://chinaberrysummer.com/journal-1

Literary Hour at JCCFS - last one this year

Read about last evening's reading at the John C. Campbell Folk School.
Click this:   https://www.glendacouncilbeall.com/2019/11/literary-hour-finale-for-2019-starred.html#.XdgrAJNKiM8

Here is a photo.

Linda Jones, Janice Moore, Meagan Lucas